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For the Everyday Creative Person

By on January 21, 2010 in mindfulness, quarter-life crisis
I’ve got to admit that things are getting a little crazy around here.
Since we left 2009, work has really kicked up. Coupled with hours sent at the gym, in transit, and the thousand errands that color and create a life, I am slipping. I’m falling into a place I’ve visited so many times before, this dark spinning place where time moves of its own volition, flying past like the taillights of a just-missed train.
Doubtless you’ve been here, too, an unwelcome houseguest in a corner of your own mind. You make time for the things you’d never thought you’d welcome (meetings, auto insurance payments, I-Hear-My-Brain-Cells-Screaming TV shows) and let go of those you never want to live without. The gym is popular. So are vegetables. But certain flagging commitments twist deeper, take a more insidious toll. Maybe you spend less time with your parents to party, shrug off a weeknight with your kids to work late. Maybe you stop finding time for the things that challenge you—the only things really worth doing.
Notice I say “you”. Clearly I don’t have a problem.
The following comes from a book on creativity, on the capture and care of that glittering bird. The author delivers advice through assignment. Write before the light breaks, he advises. Before the day can take its inevitable toll on your strength. He suggests this ritual as a habit of honoring oneself:
“When an everyday creative person has an interesting idea pop into her head and she stops to write it down, rather than letting it slip away, that is a small ritual acknowledging the importance of her own ideas. When a million tasks confront her and she stops to meditate and breathe for three seconds, rather than rushing on as if she had no self, that is a small ritual acknowledging the sanctity of her own being.”
Ah.
Now is the time for a lifeline. This is the part when I reach for a hand. I’ve fallen into this place before; I’m sure I’ve seen you once or twice. But never before have I written about it, never have I committed myself to a readership dangling like a lifeline in the distance. While I doubt your day rests on the scintillating wit and dubious wisdom of these entries, a piece of my spirit slumbers without them.
I must wake this Rip Van Winkle, shake her arm and shuttered dreams. So I take the challenge for what it is—eternal—and vow to climb with my dizzy-drunk strength. I will leave this place and resume my journey, for at heart I am a troubadour. I may dance or I may crawl, but my spirit sings all the while.
Thank you for being here to listen.
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Onward & Upward

By on January 18, 2010 in inspiration, quarter-life crisis
Hello, folks.
Good Monday morning, and happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Perhaps you are contemplating what to do on this day of sunshine and playful wind. Perhaps you will leap into the noble act of service, choosing to honor King’s spirit and belief that “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: what are you doing for others?”
Most of us—at least those with the ability to access the internet and read blogs that dither about art and beauty—are blessed to have the choice of how to live.
So onward and upward, I say. Take flight with your dreams. Change the world.
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I Display My Artistic Genius

By on January 11, 2010 in humor, quarter-life crisis, true story

My coffee table looks like a craft store.
Hundreds of magazine clippings, Mod Podge and an X-Acto knife scatter across the particleboard. These are images torn from global publications: spectacular landscapes, curious objects, women fraught with couture and impossible beauty. I’ve collected them over months like seashells, bits of color and shine to a magpie eye.
In other words, I love making collages.
God, I’m such a nerd.
Here’s the thing. I lay in bed yesterday, watching the sun creep above the rooftops, and considered all the possibilities of the day before me. I am determined to find space in my days for everything that matters to me—family, friends, physical prowess—and am prepared to use all my planning, wit, and determination to achieve it.
Granted, I didn’t get out of bed until 11AM, but sloth is a priority, too.
As I stood by the stove eating cereal at the ambitious hour of noon, I felt an overwhelming urge to do something. (Go figure.) Not just wash my face and brush my teeth, either. No, I was overcome with the urge to actually create something, to build with my hands or mind a thing of beauty, a carefully woven concept, to stretch my thoughts and shake the cobwebs out of the corners of my musty worldview.
Time for a road trip!
I zipped up the Parkway with a burgeoning sense of joy. I sang along with the radio and watched the river slip by, the choppy waters of tidal strait frothing past and away. Shifting to fifth and sailing through the sky, I rocketed into New York with all the hope of a wide-eyed pilgrim.
I wanted art, you see; I wanted a creative stimulus. On my way to visit a grade school girlfriend, I felt sure we could come up with something. Grace is a kindergarten teacher with a penchant for opera and foreign languages. No doubt she’d think of a craft to entertain our Saturday night.
I crossed my fingers for macaroni necklaces.
Four hours later, we’d sat in her Brooklyn walk-up with Thai takeout and no plan.
“The night’s really getting away from us,” she said.
I speared a chunk of eggplant and nodded. “Most places will be closed by now, right? Museums and art shops and things?”
“Yeah.” We looked at each other. “We could always just go to a bar now and make paper snowflakes in the morning. Or something.”
“True.” Then inspiration struck. “Let’s dress up!”
We squealed and ran to the bedroom. The night was a flurry of cute dresses, high heels and camera poses.
What? You were expecting artistic genius?
The morning was sunny. We sat at the kitchen table facing each other, drinking tea and wearing matching nightgowns that we bought in high school. In our twelve years of friendship, every single sleepover included a moment like this.
As we prattled along, I became aware of tiny ripples in the room, our words echoed silently by the ghosts of conversations in our past, our younger selves hovering at every angle like bright spirits in the dust motes. The rooms changed, the length of our hair and the flow of our limbs, throaty speculation now textured by violent experience. But we sat in the crosshairs of our whole lives, in a tunnel of a thousand instants just like this one, these parallel windows stretched to past and future. The room pulsed with energy, vibrant and flaring like a frame of imperfect film.
Tonight, memory floods a blank canvas. I have lived the new artistic impression, walked the shifting stage of history.
I sort through the scattered images on my table and pull what draws my eye. Fingers linger over certain attitudes, a tree with familiar leaves, a black and white screen. I draw and build, arrange and rearrange, and listen carefully to the murmur of a story, indistinct but drawing close as I search with these new eyes.
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Who Do You Want to Be?

By on January 8, 2010 in mindfulness, quarter-life crisis, true story

Somewhere in the mountains of Tennessee, I forget who I am.
Dropping between peaks, we mirror the sun. Amber light hurtles through each crevasse, blinded and blinding in layers of snow. The car flashes, a streak of steel.
I wonder where this girl is going.
We fly down a ribbon of asphalt as it unfurls through the valleys, descending past small towns, single homesteads. Lights in a window are eyes of a home on a cliff far above.
She could be anyone. Look up and marvel. These moves feel new; the air is strange.
In the parking lot of a gas station, my legs are impossibly long. I stand, taller than expected, and buoy on my toes.
Who are you? I ask.
My breath rises in clouds that follow the infinite ascension of twilight.
Who do you want to be?
Back in the car, we whistle upward.
Stars climb craggy surfaces, find their footholds in the sky. Beneath the black and open universe I sit, cradling a memory.
A fireside with an open chair, the chatter of happy voices. A promise in gentle words.
Tonight the mountain is a giant sleeping. I curl in his heart, deep in the pulse, and sleep between two streams. Snow falls on wind chimes outside my window, and silver sounds twist like a dream in the night.
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Y2K(10)

By on January 4, 2010 in quarter-life crisis, true story
Hey guys! It’s 2010!

Did you get the memo?

I, apparently, did not, considering I failed to join the rest of the world in going “live” on the internet this morning. But thanks for letting me run off on vacation like that. I’m sorry I disappeared with so little warning or explanation.

Did everyone have a nice break? See a few friends, open a few gifts? Are you well-rested? Bright-eyed? Excited by the promise of a new decade and your resolution to craft it as your own?

If so, congratulations. That makes one of us.

I lay in bed this morning, staring at the ceiling and kicking my feet under the sheets. Cocooned in the warmth of two blankets and cripplingly expensive heat, I watched sunlight play on the ceiling and tried to trick myself into feeling excited. Going back to work–it’ll be just like Christmas!

Um.

OK. It could be like the first day of school!

Nerd that I am, this encouraged me to get up. Ignoring the fact that I should have showered 15 minutes ago, I pranced to the bathroom across icy floors and considered myself in the mirror. Not too shabby, considering I got two hours of sleep and drove through four states on Friday. I went heavy with the foundation. New year, new face!

Outside my window the sun shone merrily as waves roiled in the distance. I trotted down the freshly-carpeted steps of my building and fixed a smile on my face, ready to greet the big, beautiful—

UGH! What IS this, Arctic tundra?

Smile shattered, I hauled tail across the street to my car. Drivers screeched to a halt and glared angrily out their windows.

Oh, come ON, Housewife-in-Mittens-and-a-Land-Rover. YOU aren’t losing skin cells to this freezing wind.
My car door moaned as I wrestled it open. I narrowly avoided losing my foot as the wind slammed it shut again.

Heart beating furiously, I breathed a sigh of relief. I had lived.

As I peeled down the highway, I began thinking about all the hopes I have for myself this year. To write more, to volunteer, to forge meaningful impact in word and deed. To remember to take my car for inspection.

I began thinking, and thinking, and thinking some more, and as the list grew longer my heartbeat ratched upward. There’s no time! I’m not strong enough! My eyes are bigger than my stomach!

My brain launched into a whiny monologue that hasn’t stopped since. (I probably should have resolved to be less self-indulgent, or to simply do less and pursue a Zen sort of existence. But like every twenty-something with a job and an ego, I finally set my sights on a more rigorous gym schedule. Self-betterment through bolstered vanity.)

Ever notice how the first day after vacation feels like the day after a nuclear attack? People rush around making hurried small talk, offering watery, insincere smiles. I thought I saw someone flee past with a blanket and a frozen meal.

Really?

Well, I wasn’t much better. I never got above two syllables at a time.

Eventually I shuffled into the cafeteria for a coffee. The sun set against the windows as I moped, my stabbing headache punctuated by the odd sneeze.

“Elizabeth!”

I blink heavily.

“What’s up, man?”

I look up and weakly return Timothy’s high-five. “Not much. You?”

“Aw, I’m good.” He shakes his head, tucking a smile into his chest. He has a way of pulsing when he talks, moving with the loose, fluid energy of a former basketball player. “Did you have a good vacation?”

“Sure.” Decades ago. “Did you?”

“Oh yeah.” He bounces on the balls of his feet, nearly elevating. There is a strange lightness about him, an (almost) contagious happiness in his words. “It is just so good to be here. Isn’t it?”

“Um.”

“Another year. A whole other year.”

“Sure.”

“We gotta be grateful, don’t we? We get put on this earth and now–well–look at us, man. We get a whole other year of life.”

He grinned at me, shining with joy, and I felt for a minute all my dark brooding thoughts fumble. Because this is the truth. This is it. Another year passed, another year just begun, and we have this whole life to live in it.

Happy New Year, and cheers to us. We made it.
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Under a Blanket of Snow

By on December 21, 2009 in mindfulness, quarter-life crisis
Some weather we’re having, isn’t it?
The local news reports from just below my window. Cue card dialogue snatched up and thrown, whipped down dark streets and out to sea their news of this blizzard of epic proportions.
Giants roam in low-lying clouds, puffing their chests with noisy exhales. Snow buffets up two stories high. Walls of white pass through streetlights like ghosts.
This is a night for the wild and wonderful, and I am completely alone.
I crank electronic-pop and dance like a fool. I consider the dishes and fail to do them. I talk for hours to a man in Australia and pretend it’s the middle of summer.
“Yes, tell me about your barbeque. I’m planning one myself. I fancy a swim, perhaps a walk in the sun? And yes, bring the sunscreen; I agree this heat wave is dreadful.”
Snowdrifts creep high as hours pass.
It’s Saturday night, and I’m in bed by 8. Ice creaks heavily on the windowpane. The covers are greenish igloo walls, translucent and reflecting the glow of my body heat.  I dive into a book about magic, about witches and spells and enchantments, about talking trees and heroic beasts. I am gone, disappeared, hanging to this body by a thread.
I swim deeper, sunk in a world that pulses and brightens, pushing on my mind and heart from all sides. My fate is here, spinning slowly between darkness and light. I follow the action of another world and breathe in air humming gently. My body turns over on cold cotton sheets; my heart hangs naked above the stars.
The landscape of my mind is vast and uncharted. Awareness of denizens drift by in scraps like strains of a melody forgotten, familiar. A man whose smile starts with his eyes cuddles a baby against the weight of his fears, alone in a house like a rowboat at sea. A redhead weeps angry tears into a cup that cools without her lover’s touch. A boy curls beside a hospital bed and feels for the first time an ache without end. A thousand more crowd in starlight, these memories of past and future, countless splinters from a lifetime of love.
We rarely see more than a simple story, the one we tell ourselves each day upon waking. But we are characters, we are voyagers, we are scraps of songs in the night.  We hover above our cloudy snowdrifts, the howling winds of what’s to come, and in these moments live something grand. For we will dream in spite of ourselves, find wonder and fate in a winter storm.
This is some weather, both outside and in. I sleep like a child with a book in my hand, lost in a blizzard of epic proportions.
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I Just Want to Live Alone in a Field

By on December 8, 2009 in quarter-life crisis

Near Dunedin, New Zealand, circa 2005. 


I open the door. Cold slaps my cheek and pockets my breath.
The sun is gone. I step into the darkness.
Something is moving; something speaks. I cannot hear but rather feel the words in my flesh, the trembling excitement. It’s the feeling when you wake up and remember it’s your birthday. When you sit up in bed to peek out the window and realize the world is covered in snow.
 “It’s time,” the words say.
I shiver in the parking lot. Watch the wind pass through the streetlights.
 “You’ve found it. The world.”
I close my eyes and feel a great leap.
“This is all that exists.”
Thumping hard, my poor heart and I. We are weak in the face of the truth.
“What will you do?”
I look up, alone with the moon and a couple of lampposts.
Then a remember the house in New Zealand, a place where I thought I could live like a writer. Forever alone, not lonely exactly, just deep in the world with my thoughts. The house stood in the middle of nowhere, a single room on a broad field flanked by mountains and a low, cresting sea.  Silence for miles, just the chop of flat waves and swimming sea-beasts. Wandering clouds, close enough to touch, drifted through arcs of ethereal rainbows. 
I imagine spring breaking across that field, then slipping to summer and summer to fall.  The color of the grass would be all that changes, the grass and the shape of the stones on the beach. I close my eyes and imagine my heart beating steady, steadier than the roar of the tide.
I remember now. I remember what I must do. I’ll uncover these places; I’ll lay them bare. I will open windows and look across highways to see fields of common experience, moments of certainty, places that let us live as we ought to.
Inspiration feels like a first kiss, like reading my favorite childhood story and sensing the world catch on fire around me. It’s a better life than the one I imagined.
Tonight I stand in a dark parking lot, alone with the moon and a couple of lampposts. Tonight is the world, and I have found it, at once and suddenly everywhere.
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Adulthood = Achieved

By on December 4, 2009 in humor, quarter-life crisis, true story
It’s official: I am a real person.
How, you ask? Simple, really: I hung a picture for the first time ever. Like on a wall, with a hammer and a nail.
Maybe that’s not a big deal to you, but it’s something I seriously never thought I would do. Much like planning my dentists’ appointments. Or turning 25.
Grown-up things sneak up on you like that.
One minute you’re eating peanut butter and jelly and jockeying for seat space with the same girls you’ve eaten in the school cafeteria with for years, and you’re all stressing about your hair and your skin and the boys sitting at the table behind you punching each other; the next minute you’re eating peanut butter & jelly and stretching out your legs because you’re sitting by yourself in the work cafeteria, and the boys behind you are men talking in hushed voices (and they’re older than your father).
And you sit alone and wonder—the voice in your head as loud as a companion’s would be—if this is actually how it’s supposed to be, if you’re really supposed to cross your legs at the ankles and concern yourself about things like the delicacy of inter-office politics and makeup that merely keeps up with the Joneses, so to speak, because you finally know that you are pretty enough to get by without it, and does that make you vain or does it make you vapid, and if you’ve really devoted all this mental energy to a conversation that isn’t happening in real time does it even matter at the end of the day because no one is there to judge you. But you judge yourself, anyway, and it’s worse than someone with answers because the questions never end. You want to be the person you thought you’d be now, back when you were awkward and young and dreaming, that girl who was smart and funny and racing the wind for the next adventure. And you look around and think of all you’re still wanting, all the things you planned, and you feel your hopes crowding, galloping against your ribs like horses, and you try to soothe them, to calm them with platitudes like sugar cubes, the sweetness of your small and ordinary victories. Eventually they settle, lower their proud and beautiful faces, nose softly at the fence and one another. They shuffle around the fields of your heart, magnificent and waiting, and you vow that one day you’ll throw the gates open, that you will finally set them free.
And for now?
Well, for now you’ll achieve a variety of firsts. Your first cavity, your first paycheck, your very first quarter-life crisis. You will hang a painting for the first time, and you will come to work with a new sense of self. The cafeteria will be a little bit brighter, the conversation a little more certain.
And that peanut butter and jelly sandwich will be just as delicious as you remember. 
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Happy 25th Birthday to Me

By on November 27, 2009 in mindfulness, quarter-life crisis, true story
My birthday is a shock of brightness, a slap of cold like a wave.
Wind washes down the streets of New York, blows through empty tables at Herald Square. Daylight billows with full sails, running fast as a ship before the wind.
I float in the chill. Warmth saps from my skin into the chair like ice beneath my thighs, this table a griddle of frozen iron. I lament my forgone jacket, the pointed idiocy of wearing heels. I wipe watery eyes and discover last night’s eyeliner all over my hands.
Welcome to age 25. You look homeless.
I chug a bottle of water and consider the hazy final hours of my life. (That’s right, it’s all over. Goodbye, beauty; goodbye, joy. I’m pretty sure adulthood is nothing but a maudlin prognostication of misspent youth.) Dinner + friends became wine + food + friends, then just wine + friends, and eventually one smeary mess of winefriends. I woke up on the floor of someone else’s apartment, stepped over the body of a close winefriend and thought about food. 
My stomach growls. What a vicious cycle.
Time to go. Time for a winding train ride, a sinuous hour of self-reflection. Alone with my thoughts and unbrushed teeth.
I stand up in a gust that takes my breath away.
When I come home, I’ll be shiny and new. I’ll bring fresh-minted wisdom to past perspectives. I’ll touch the life I am steadily building and greet the ocean through my window. I’ll make my bed and finally acknowledge that my refrigerator contains nothing but cheese.
You have to start small, I think to myself. Have those meager beginnings before you find greatness.
“You will find greatness.”
“What?” I turn around with hair on end. 
“Your success. You’ll find it.” An unassuming woman, middle-aged and mousey, rubs her hands together. “Where’s your jacket?”
“It’s at home.” An uncomfortable pause. “Thank you.” I grab my bag and prepare to flee.
“I’m getting very strong vibes from you,” she says. Oh boy. “I wouldn’t normally bother you. I am here with a friend—“ a man at a nearby table waves to us—“but my sense is so clear for you right now. This must be a special day in your life.”
My stomach twists.
The jury is out on my belief in psychics. Facts from my freshman seminar, Pseudo-science, still trail me like shrieking skeptics, but I don’t believe in continued coincidence. To me the world should be read like a book, a series of metaphors and beautiful images, and it’s up to us to distinguish auguries from minutiae.
And every so often, on special days, the universe grabs us by the shoulders and shakes us around a little.
“So do you have the time, my dear?”
I look at her face, the lines on her forehead, the papery skin of her hands as she twists them. I wonder how far those gray eyes can see.
I wonder if I want to find out.
“I am not sure that I do right now.” I sniff, quelling my desire to blow my nose on my sleeve. “I’m afraid I have a train to catch.”
“Alright, my dear.” She smiles and shrugs. “I wish you’d let me. But you should know I see good things, a long and happy life.”
“Thank you.”
“Go put on a coat.”
“I will.” I raise my hand and turn into the wind.
Let this tide sweep me into the future. Let’s leave the far shoreline unseen. For now it’s enough just to be here, wrapped in the brightness of this day.
* * *
I’ve almost made it the whole way home. Then the universe tries one last time.
“The next book I read is going to be yours.”
I look up in surprise. The man on the seat next to me smiles, eyes kind under a cloth cap. His fingers brush the cover of a novel etched with colorful Spanish.
I noticed this when he sat down, of course. Trains are designed for people-watching, rickety boxes that fly like theaters down the line. We are suspended in stage lights, shifty-eyed among exaggerated action and censored conversation.
Now the fourth wall has crumbled, and we are face-to-face.
“Are you a writer?”
I blush and close my journal. “I hope so.”
“You are passionate.” In the voice of a narrator: “That’s why you will be successful, why I saw you cry.”
I had been writing about the past and the future, fear and desire and a soothsayer’s call. My eyes became full when my heart overflowed. “This matters so much to me.”
“Then good luck,” he says.
“Thank you.” Our train shudders into the station. “I need it.”
He stands and proffers another small smile, the universe veiled behind his eyes. “I don’t believe you do.”
As I watch him walk away, a gust of cold air skims down the aisle. Hello, beauty; hello, joy.
The train rolls forward, slowly at first. I move with it into brightness, into the windswept future.
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Maps

By on November 26, 2009 in mindfulness, quarter-life crisis
In my apartment, the year is 1664.

Tonight I put a map of the world on my wall.
I stand in front of it and stare.
Did you know the continent of Antarctica has a flag? It looks like this: 

Are you kidding me? Can I have that job? Give me Clip Art and three hours and I’ll have the whole world sorted.

Speaking of jobs, my map is actually a calculated career move. Considering I work for an international company, it’s about time I stop confusing Shanghai with Singapore. I bought this gem to help me learn (Asia among other things). A little cartography at odd hours, some quiet geographic tutelage.

The apartment is silent. My bare feet press into the floor.

I touch the map with gentle fingers, trace a smooth and fragile stretch of miles. I skim the Alps, the burning curves of Brazil, linger above the Southern Lights.

I study the colors, convolutions of mountains and seas, distant names of aspirational cities. I look for a story, something simple and true.

It doesn’t work.

I fear I spend too much time this way, attempting to read the world like tea leaves. I wait for disparate elements to arrange themselves, to align like faces in a dream. Hours pass without an answer, and still I wonder: isn’t a map an invitation? When nothing is certain, doesn’t the heart take flight?

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